The futures of sound
The genesis of my obsession for spherical beamforming arrays and other cool sh*t.
This is a late, but fresh update on how I got obsessed with spherical beamforming arrays, and why you probably would, too. Grab a coffee, and enjoy this one.
If you’re in Europe, Berlin is without a doubt the Paris of progressive sound scene — from electronics, through a vivid free jazz scene to sound technology. With full respect to Lutetia Parisorum.
In March I made several trips to Berlin to see people, places and listen to frontier spatial audio tech first person. It could not happen without visiting Funkhaus — the former GDR broadcasting megainvestment, which could easily belong Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Brazil, or other dystopias, with one difference — being real.
It’s been a decade since I visited Funkhaus last time, when its revitalization started. So much, and yet, nothing changed. Same focus on sound, same magnetic people.
4D Sound - where things get real
4D Sound is the backbone of several spatial sound studios, and is one of the pinnacles of spatial audio technology. From the pioneering one, Monom in Berlin, through a few more in Europe, and a couple in North America, the technology has evolved over the last decade, but remains known to few.
What’s special about it?
Listen to a good stereo, and you’ll probably have a vague sense of space and stage. Generally it’s the musical content that touches you, rather than the physical nature of sound. Go to an IMAX or a large concert experience, and things get a tad stronger. But you’re still conditioned to believe. Paired with crowd emotions or good picture, and things start being a bit more convincing, but rarely physical. Those who seek stronger, primeval sensations, usually find joy in the gut-wrenching experiences of bass-focused events a’la Lost Lands or Bass Canyon.
But 4D Sound at Monom is different.
It’s not ignorable. And it’s not a sound pressure knock-out. It’s in the zone in between, that totally messes with your senses. You’re not listening to a sound system anymore. You’re hearing sound that’s so real, that all of a sudden your brain just stops computing. Because you can’t pair the sound with a visual cue.
Technically, Monom (and many of the 4D Sound studios) is a lattice of 48 omnidirectional speakers, distributed in a 4×4×4 spatial grid, plus 9 subwoofers in the floor. Couple it with state-of-the-art sound processing and spatialization software, and we’re miles beneath the marketing yadda yadda of latest Dolby Atmos buzzwords.
But it’s not just about the technology. William, the co-founder of Monome, treated us with a few pieces, which felt like a decent tech demo. But It’s only when he played to us a composition of his own, a soundscape inspired by extinct species, when the technology and a mature artistic vision, paired with intentional choices made a truly touching difference.
I strongly believe that technology is cold and dead on its own. It takes artists and craftsmen, plus a dose of out-of-the-ordinary inspiration to make things that are remarkable. This happened at Monom.
Spaes lab in Berlin
My other trip was to visit Gerriet Sharma at Spaes — the lab for spatial sound aesthetics, also in Berlin’s Funkhaus.
Gerriet’s work has been on the frontier for good two decades, including wavefield synthesis, ambisonic arrays, and spherical ambisonic beamformers, developed at IEM in Graz.
You see, there are two problems with cutting edge technology. First, it’s cutting-edge, and second — it’s a technology. So often, these two are enough to steal the spotlight, with artistic matter dragging way behind.
What intrigued and attracted me to Gerriet in the first place, was a genuine, uncompromised artist-researcher approach, and a clear artistic stance. I knew I had to meet the man, and listen to his work in person.
My artistic practice is an inquiry into the politics of hearing and listening, aiming to uncover the underlying mechanisms of power and hierarchical historiographies as they manifest in the modern capitalist era. Here, spatial occupation, sound reproduction, and economic acceleration have evolved in sync, perpetuating colonialist and patriarchal biases in the making and experiencing of sound. Conventions of representation collude with ideologies, desires, and discourses. Through the utilisation of advanced loudspeaker environments, beamforming loudspeakers, 3D-audio, and sound sculpting projectors, I seek to formulate an alternative and open invitation to the listener, sharing an extended ontology of sonic spatial arts by composing sound as space.
— GKSH
It happened in March, and beyond Gerriet’s generosity in sharing his experiences with spatial sound, we enjoyed a several-hours-long conversation about everything from late-stage capitalism, through education, to artistic leadership, and our role in nurturing younger generations, shaping their attentivenes and responsibility. These discussions don’t happen often and with everyone. When they do, they stick.
The classics - ambisonic arrays
Ambisonic dome arrays are the ‘classic’ of the surround sound. Usually they consist of a range of 16-32 speakers arranged in rings or a dome. Paired with a deliberately crafted sound design or compositions, they can deliver an intriguing and engaging experience.
This sort of a technical approach is what I envisioned for Echotronica festival, as one of the main layers for turning the temple into a musical instrument, especially that the architecture itself is dome-shaped and literally begs for it.
Back to Spaes - although the sound system was not surprising in any single way for me, Gerriet’s compositions made it sing.
A thing about Sharma’s work is that his language is clear, minimalist and abstract. It makes perfect sense, because if your focus is on spatial dimension of sound, anything that resembles the music we all know, draws us away from the focus on space. It’s the curse of temporal linearity, and cliches etched so deep in our perception, we don’t even realize they exist.
Get a sense of Sharma’s language by listening to his compositions like Firniss or Longspaces.
But it’s not the ambisonic dome that was the highlight.
Spherical Beamforming Arrays
While envisioning the core ideas of Echotronica festival, my main focus was on the intersection of sound with space and architecture — the very same subjects I explored years ago in Rebirth film.
With that in mind, a core question arised:
How do you make architecture actively involved in shaping the sound, rather than being a mere canvas?
Most of the sound systems focus on chasing some sort of perfection and fidelity, treating architecture as an enemy. In the ideal world, the architecture should not even exist.
I question this narrative.
For me, how the sound interacts with space, and how we perceive space through sound is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of sonic experience.
This is where spherical beamforming arrays become interesting. How does it work?
The idea behind ambisonic domes is that you listen to the sound coming from outside of the dome inwards, and as long as you sit in a hotspot, this should (and sometimes does) feel like a 3D sound field. You kinda know it from the IMAX. Frankly — this works only as long as as you are willing to accept the convention, and in my experience, feels a lot like listening to a lot of speakers, not a sound field.
Spherical Beamforming Arrays (SBA’s) turn this idea inside out. The instrument is put in the center of the space, and projects precisely focused sound beams outwards. The beams bounce off the architecture (or the reflective screens), and when they reach you, your brain reconstructs the space.
In some way, you listen to space, through sound.
Listening to the IKO and Sharma’s compositions exactly confirmed what I imagined about this instrument. Similarly to 4D Sound at Monome, it was damn convincing. I listened to sound and space. Not speakers.
I got hooked. Then I got obsessed.
Decades of research and the IKO
SBAs story starts in the Ircam’s 1980’s research driven by the desire to reproduce the nature of real instruments. But the early cubic 6-speaker design never delivered. The project got buried for years.
In 2014 it was picked by the team of Franz Zotter of IEM in Graz, and from there a decade of innovation sprung. As a result of the OSIL project, the current model of IKO was devised - a 20-speaker icosahedron, capable of 3rd order ambisonic projection. Here’s a good article going into the who what and when of the OSIL project.
There exist probably about a dozen of IKOs in the wild, primarily in the research centers, and just a couple in the hands of artists, including the one Sharma works with. The original IKO is a marvel, but requires a truly deep pocket or institutional funding.
What if you badly want one?
Plans and ambitions - building a Poor Man’s IKO
I spent the last couple of months learning everything I could about SBAs, and came up with a small library to organize my learnings. Dozens of papers later, I’m slowly building understanding of these… and building my own.
Based on IEM’s Franz Zotter and Riedel’s later research it’s possible to build a much smaller and more affordable version - called 3-9-3, for speakers layout. Several other downscales have been made recently, including 1-7-0 and 1-7-1.
As a warmup exercise, I’ve just wrapped a 393 build myself.
But that’s just a warmup. Last month kept me busy imagining the path forward — building something new, based on the new research on the post-IKO mixed-order beamformers, like the 3-9-3, but comparable in size and power to the IKO. Or even larger.
And that’s the reason this post waited over a month.
The progress? Coming in the next one.
How’s your coffee?